New Testament

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The New Testament is the second part of the Christian Bible: a collection of twenty-seven short works, written in Greek, that the church came to hold as scripture beside the Jewish writings it calls the Old Testament. The name itself states a claim — testament renders the Greek diathēkē, covenant — that these books record a new covenant between God and humanity, fulfilling and not discarding the old.

The contents fall into recognizable kinds. Four gospels narrate the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; the Acts of the Apostles continues the story into the early movement. Then come the letters — thirteen attributed to Paul, others to figures such as Peter, James, and John — written to particular congregations about particular problems, and only later read as universal doctrine. The collection ends with Revelation, a visionary account of the end of the age. Scholarship dates the earliest of these writings, several of Paul’s letters, to roughly the 50s CE, within a generation of the crucifixion; the gospels followed across the later first century, and a few of the shorter works perhaps into the second.

There was no New Testament at the start, only writings in circulation. Which of them counted as scripture was settled slowly and unevenly over the first four centuries, by use and argument rather than decree; lists that match the present twenty-seven appear in the fourth century, but contested books remained at the edges, and other gospels and acts were read in some communities and rejected in others. The Gnostic currents preserved their own writings, later largely lost, and the question of which texts belonged was bound up with the question of which teaching was orthodox — a process visible only at a slant in the surviving record, since the winners’ canon is most of what came down.

For the traditions that hold these books, the stakes are not literary. Christians across their many divisions receive the New Testament as revelation, the authoritative witness to Christ, however they differ on its inspiration, its interpretation, and the church that reads it. Within the wider esoteric reception the same texts have been read otherwise — for hidden senses beneath the plain one, an inner gospel addressed to those able to hear it, a reading the church mostly resisted and the Gnostics embraced.

What the documents are, set against what later belief made of them, is one of the most worked-over questions in the study of religion. The writings are early, occasional, and human — letters and remembered teaching, composed for immediate ends. The canon is the later judgment that drew a line around them and called what lay inside it the word of God.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

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